Homer

The oldest one that we can actually name is a retelling of Medea, built entirely from lines of Virgil, credited to, I think it was a writer, but it was credited to Hosidius Gaetaeus, Sometime in the third or fourth century, something like that.

Not long after, a Byzantine empress named Eudicea wrote centos built from Homer as a form of tribute.

The technique went quiet for a long stretch and then came back came roaring back with the modernists.

There was Ezra Pound's Kantos, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

Whoever obeys the gods, to him they particularly listen.

Homer.

Aquarius, January 20th through February 18th.

There's a time for transformation and that time is when the cycle you're in comes to a close.

Parthenope, the name of an ancient Greek settlement that sat where part of the Italian city of Naples now does.

Parthenope, also the name of a siren in Greek mythology who cast herself into the sea and drowned when her songs failed to entice the legendary Greek king Odysseus, the protagonist and hero of Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey.

Or the dude, you know, Matt Damon, plays in Christopher Nolan's interpretation of The Odyssey.

pissed i still haven't seen that movie by the way i've heard it's fucking awesome uh both girls uh named after where they were born and i think florence got the better end of that deal parthenope a super cool backstory to that name now it's it's it's a cool name once you get used to it uh i'm sure it's a fucking awesome name in greece but uh they were a british family and i'm guessing she got pretty sick of having to explain how the fuck she ended up with the name of uh parthenope Florence grew up in a privileged, wealthy Victorian family that traveled extensively, moved in a very elite social circles.

I suspect it is pre-Christian.

I've just finished reading a book by the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare called The File on Age, where two Irishmen strike off into the Albanian highlands, convinced that Homer's The Odyssey had its roots in Albanian folk legends.

You know, there is a school of thought that really believes this.

There are a lot of Greek ruins in Albania.

For many centuries, as we know, the influence of the whole ancient world, Greek, Hebrew, or Roman, in literature, was communicated through the medium of the metropolitan and, in the strict sense, secular atmosphere of Rome.

For Homer there were Daries and Dictys, for the Hebraism of early Christianity the Vulgate and the metropolitan church of Peter.

Hardly before Herder gathered the treasures of old Hebrew song, hardly before Goethe and Byron and Shelley in their several ways rediscovered the Prometheus legend, did Greek or Hebraic poetry count among the forces making for the elemental, the ursprünglich, in humanity, not for its complex culture and civilized convention.

In the poetic as in the political world, the dream of the Roman Empire lingered, an ineluctable memory, a presence not to be put by, mingling with and transforming the traditional poetry as well as the traditional polity of the Germanic tribes, turning the Frankish king into an emperor of Rome and building upon the basis of his exploits against Saxon and Saracen cycles of epic lays, significantly called romances, and chansons de geste, the imagined record of the reis gestae of a new Roman people.

His radically anthropomorphic imagination obliterates the natural form with the human symbol.

Like Shelley, he is a great myth-maker; but Shelley's myth-world has something of the naivete of primeval nature-worship.

Hugo's is the voluptuous Olympus of a romantic Homer, alive with pageant and drama, with war and council, mingling the sublime and the grotesque, splendor and deformity, mystery and squalor, the spiritual and the bourgeois.

It is worth while pausing a moment to compare the ways in which these two great myth-making imaginations of France and England bodied forth the visions which possessed and transported each.

And yet for all that I do not greatly pity my friend, because that peradventure adversity of fortune may teach him once to repent himself and to amend, seeing that he would not follow and do after my counsel and admonitions.

And verily though I, enforcing me to the same thing and purpose, have been turned and tossed with so many chances and tempests, that Ulysses, a man living ever in trouble, which Homer speaketh of, might be counted in comparison to me even Polycrates, which ever lived in prosperity without any manner trouble.

I do not utterly repent me of my labor, seeing it hath moved and provoked so many unto the study of godly virtue.

Nor I myself am not utterly to be blamed and rebuked, although my living be not in all points agreeing to mine own precepts and counsels.

And I beseech thee, how small is the reward which those wretched men go about to get with so great jeopardies and diligence? Verily, but to have praise of a wretched man their captain, and that they might be praised with a rude and homely song, such as are used to be made in the time of war, to have happily their names written in a harper's beadroll, to get a garland of grass or oaken leaves, or at the most to bring home a little more vantage or winning with them.

We, on the other side, clean contrary, be kindled neither with shame nor with hope of reward; and yet he beholdeth us while we fight that shall quit our pain if we win the field.

But what reward setteth forth the chief ruler of our game for them that win the mastery? Not mules, as Achilles did in Homer; not tripods, that is to say, meat boards with three feet, as Aeneas did in Virgil; but such as the eye never saw, nor the ear never heard, neither could sink into the heart of man.

And these rewards he giveth in the mean season to his whiles they be yet fighting, as solaces and things to comfort them in their labours and travails.

And therefore let everyone know that nothing which hath the harmony of musical connection can be transferred from its own tongue into another without shattering all its sweetness and harmony.

And this is the reason why Homer is not translated from Greek into Latin, as are the other writings that we have of theirs.

And this is the reason why the verses of the Psalter are without the sweetness of music and harmony, for they were translated from Hebrew into Greek and from Greek into Latin, and in the first translation all their sweetness perished.

And thus is the conclusion reached, which was promised at the beginning of the chapter immediately before this.

Nor let any deem it too lofty an utterance when it says, For they are well-nigh gods.

For, as argued above in the seventh chapter of the third treatise, just as there are men most base and bestial, so there are men most noble and divine.

And Aristotle proves this in the seventh of the ethics by the text of the poet Homer.

Wherefore let not him of the Uberti of Florence, nor him of the Visconti of Milan, say, Because I am of such a race, I am noble.

I missed the first one, didn't I? Yes, you actually both missed the first one.

It's Homer.

Homer is the Greek poet.

Yes.

In the end, you didn't beat Gardeep.

Actually, I'm disappointed.

I've never read, you know, like what is it, Homer, the the Iliad? You

know, there's some stuff

out there.